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Issue #57 /June 2013 



Staff 



EDITOR-IN-CHIEF 

Sunit Singh 

MANAGING EDITOR 

Nathan L. Smith 

EDITORS 

Spencer A. Leonard 
Pac Pobric 
Laurie Rojas 
Josh Rome 
Bret Schneider 
James Vaughn 

COPY EDITORS 

Jacob Cayia 
Lucy Parker 
Emmanuel Tellez 

PROOF EDITOR 

Edward Remus 

DESIGNERS 

Brian Hioe 
Nathan L. Smith 

WEB EDITOR 

Ninad Pandit 



Statement of purpose 

Taking stock of the universe of positions and goals that 
constitutes leftist politics today, we are left with the 
disquieting suspicion that a deep commonality underlies 
the apparent variety: What exists today is built upon the 
desiccated remains of what was once possible. 

In order to make sense of the present, we find it 
necessary to disentangle the vast accumulation of posi- 
tions on the Left and to evaluate their saliency for the 
possible reconstitution of emancipatory politics in the 
present. Doing this implies a reconsideration of what is 
meant by the Left. 

Our task begins from what we see as the general 
disenchantment with the present state of progressive 
politics. We feel that this disenchantment cannot be cast 
off by sheer will, by simply "carrying on the fight," but 
must be addressed and itself made an object of critique. 
Thus we begin with what immediately confronts us. 

The Platypus Review is motivated by its sense that the 
Left is disoriented. We seek to be a forum among a va- 
riety of tendencies and approaches on the Left— not out 
of a concern with inclusion for its own sake, but rather 
to provoke disagreement and to open shared goals as 
sites of contestation. In this way, the recriminations and 
accusations arising from political disputes of the past 
may be harnessed to the project of clarifying the object 
of leftist critique. 

The Platypus Review hopes to create and sustain a 
space for interrogating and clarifying positions and orien- 
tations currently represented on the Left, a space in which 
questions may be raised and discussions pursued that 
would not otherwise take place. As long as submissions 
exhibit a genuine commitment to this project, all kinds of 
content will be considered for publication. 



The 




Platypus Review # 



Issue #57 I June 2013 



1 Black politics in the age of Obama 

Cedric Johnson and Mel Rothenberg 



2 Conversations on the Left 

What is to be done? 

Bhaskar Sunkara, James Turley, and Benjamin BLumberg 



WWW: 

La contra Adorno 

The sex-economic problem of Platypus 

Noah R. Gataveckas 



Submission guidelines 

Articles will typically range in length from 750-4,500 
words, but longer pieces will be considered. Please send 
article submissions and inquiries about this project to: 
review_editorldplatypusl917.org. All submissions should 
conform to the Chicago Manual of Style. 



WWW: 



Nikolai Bukharin on the life of A. A. Bogdanov 

Evgeni V. Pavlov 



The Platypus Review is funded by 

The University of Chicago Student Government 

Dalhousie Student Union 

Loyola University of Chicago 

School of the Art Institute of Chicago Student Government 

The New School 

New York University 

The Platypus Affiliated Society 



www.platypu.s1 91 7.org 



57 



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3 The Platypus Review 



Black pOUtiCS, continued from page 1 

the converse: A black movement, to be successful, must 
be animated by a vision of human emancipation. A black 
movement that narrowed its sights exclusively to the 
interests of African Americans would be isolated and 
defeated. 

Those are generalities. Now I want to look at a 
concrete historical moment in light of the themes I've 
raised. In 1964, at the height of Civil Rights Movement, 
Fanny Lou Hamer and other leading civil rights activists 
organized the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party 
(MFDP]. They sought to challenge the racist leader- 
ship of the Mississippi Democratic Party, which had 
excluded, both by law and through extra-legal violence, 
any participation, including voting, of Mississippi blacks 
in politics. Excluded from the official primary choice of 
delegates to the Democratic National Convention sched- 
uled for the fall of 1964, MFDP organized its own primary 
process. They selected a delegation to the convention to 
challenge the seating of the lily-white racist delegates 
chosen by the official Mississippi Democratic Party. 

This was at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. 
The massive 1963 March on Washington had driven 
home the 1 963 federal civil rights bill, outlawing much 
legally enforced discrimination. The 1 964 civil rights 
bill, then on the agenda, would prohibit the poll tax 
and other barriers to black voting. The whole Jim Crow 
system of legal enforcement of the caste system, which 
deprived blacks of the elementary political and social 
rights automatically enjoyed by whites, was crumbling. 
Within the next few years it would be wiped out. In this 
context, the black movement was turning to confront 
national and class oppression beyond discrimination 
against individuals. This raised issues of enfranchising 
of the community and the freeing of black workers who 
were universally relegated to the lower layers of the 
working class and to the reserve army of labor. At its 
sharpest this raised the issue of political power for the 
community, an empowerment that ultimately threat- 
ened the existing class and property relationships. 

The challenge of the MFDP was then a move for 
community political power. It occasioned a crisis in the 
national Democratic Party. The party leadership was 



What Reuther and the Democratic leadership ended 
up offering the MFDP was to add a couple of their lead- 
ers to the official delegation with the stipulation that the 
MFDP would abide by the majority decisions of the rac- 
ist delegation on what issues to raise and what motions 
to support. This so-called compromise was obviously 
unacceptable. In the end the racist delegation walked 
out, offended that they were asked to mingle with MFDP 
people, but the MFDP delegation was not seated and 
organized a brief sit-in to protest. It also left the conven- 
tion. 

What were the consequences of this? The black 
movement learned that when it came to issues of com- 
munity power and, more broadly, issues of national 
oppression, their white liberal allies, and in particular 
those involved in labor politics, would abandon them. 
This is the lesson they, and SNCC, which I was in at the 
time, drew from this. The betrayal by labor was particu- 
larly damaging because effectively raising class issues, 
fundamental to black emancipation, was only possible 
with the active participation of a substantial section 
of white workers. For this, the active involvement of 
at least a powerful section of the trade unions was 
required. The rejection of the MFDP at the 1964 Demo- 
cratic Convention by even the most progressive section 
of labor convinced the most advanced elements of the 
black movement that this coalition would not consoli- 
date. 

Within the year, the slogan of "Black Power," which 
previously had been raised by only the nationalist fringe 
of the black movement, had become the dominant 
battle cry of a much broader militant layer. Stokely Car- 
michael, who became head of SNCC in 1966, took this 
slogan up in 1 965. He also wrote with Charles Hamilton 
the most influential argument for Black Power, bringing 
it into mass action in Birmingham and Watts as the Civil 
Rights Movement moved north. 

One cannot really fault this turn by the militant black 
leadership. Given the black upsurge generated by the 
earlier period of the civil rights activism and the rejec- 
tion of opposition to national oppression by their white 
liberal supporters, and in particular by labor, they had 




Aaron Henry, leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, before the Credentials Committee 
of the 1964 Democratic National Convention. 



extremely concerned with the long-term implications, 
not just in the 1964 elections. Everyone knew that Presi- 
dent Johnson would be nominated and, riding a wave 
of popular approval aided enormously by his success in 
passing civil rights legislation, would be reelected. What 
the Democratic leadership was concerned with was the 
impact the MFDP challenge would have on their elec- 
toral hegemony in the south, overseen by white racist 
party organizations. Lyndon Johnson was explicit about 
this. 

The decision of the Democratic leadership was to try 
and juggle both balls. On the one hand, the Democratic 
Party would embrace— it really had no choice— the 
end of Jim Crow. On the other hand, it would keep 
the southern racist electoral apparatus in tact, mak- 
ing some mild cosmetic changes to accommodate the 
times. The decision was to prove disastrous for the 
Democrats, as well as for the black movement. The 
Democrats managed to lose political hegemony in the 
south, which they have never recovered to this day. At 
the same time, they set themselves in opposition to, 
and effectively frustrated, the development of a black 
movement that could have led the coalition to the next 
level of struggle. 

Walter Reuther, head of the United Auto Workers 
union (UAW]— probably the leading progressive trade 
union figure, and a major figure in the Democratic Par- 
ty—was chosen by the Democratic Party leadership to 
negotiate with the MFDP's demand that they be seated 
instead of the racists. 

The UAW was the leading industrial union then. I 
myself had worked in the Wayne Mercury Auto plant in 
the 1950s, which was not an unusual assembly plant. 
Among the thousands of workers, about a third were 
black, dating from World War II; another third were 
white, including the majority of skilled workers and 
those who had been there the longest (mainly of East- 
ern European background]; and the final third were the 
most recent workers, white southerners from rural and 
small-town backgrounds who tended to work part of the 
year, during the busy season, and returned to the south 
during the slow periods. Auto assembly tended to be 
seasonal at that time. 

The politics in the plant were very complex, yet 
revealing. The ruling union caucus followed Reuther. 
This caucus was based on the older white workers, but 
with a significant following among black workers. The 
opposition caucus, which was strong and periodically 
controlled the elected plant union, was a mixed bag in 
which leftists dominated. Some of these were mem- 
bers of the Communist Party, but also included were a 
significant number of black workers. The newly arrived 
white southerners were less active overall, but some 
formed the basis of a small but visible Klan-affiliated 
racist white caucus. 

The point I want to make is that there was then a sig- 
nificant mass of civil rights supporters among the union 
members, including in Reuther's caucus. Reuther him- 
self had been a visible civil rights advocate and the UAW 
had good relations with the mainline civil rights orga- 
nizations, such as the NAACP. It was also supportive of 
the more militant sectors led by King and even provided 
discreet financial support to the most radical wing led 
by SNCC. This is why Reuther was chosen to negotiate 
with the MFDP. He had credibility with them. 



nowhere else to go. If you have to fight the battle against 
national oppression by yourself, without significant 
white allies, you have to do it under a banner that can 
unite the vast majority of blacks. The tragedy, however, 
is that by narrowing the struggle in this way to being 
a minority nationality struggle, it became much more 
difficult to win. In fact, the struggle presumed that the 
ruling elite— the ruling white elite— despite the vast 
economic and military resources at their disposal, were 
too divided and weak, presumably due to international 
anti-imperialist movements, to sustain their system of 
white supremacy. The experience of the last 40 years 
has not borne this out. 

These issues consumed the Civil Rights Movement. 
Malcolm X, trying to negotiate the terrain between nar- 
row nationalism and a broader anti-imperialist perspec- 
tive, was murdered by hardcore nationalists. Martin 
Luther King, committed to a broad coalition, linked up 
with the developing anti-war movement. Attempting 
to maintain unity between the older liberal civil rights 
forces and an emerging youth-based and multi-racial 
anti-imperialist movement, in the late 1960s he turned 
to labor and class-based struggles. This was a promis- 
ing development, cut short by his assassination by rac- 
ists. The Civil Rights Movement spawned many signifi- 
cant social movements in the decades that followed, but 
as a black-led broad political movement that presented 
a fundamental challenge to the existing social order, it 
was dead by 1970. 

Of course, the Civil Rights Movement was not a total 
failure. In its first phase, up to 1 964, when its focus 
was fighting caste oppression— the system of Jim Crow 
laws and discriminatory practices— it held together and 
was largely successful. Its major social impact was to 
promote the creation of a new black middle class inte- 
grated into the mainstream of U.S. economic and social 
life. The three-generation rise of Michelle Obama's fam- 
ily is a striking example of this quite significant achieve- 
ment. Still, though African Americans have benefited 
from the demise of Jim Crow, the fundamental national 
and class oppression that weighed on the majority of 
blacks 50 years ago has not disappeared. In certain 
basic respects— unemployment, incarceration, lack of 
community empowerment— it has arguably worsened. 

The failures of the movement of the 1950s and '60s 
had an equally profound impact on subsequent Ameri- 
can history. There had been a white racist backlash 
since the Supreme Court banned legal school segrega- 
tion in 1954, and this continued throughout the battles 
of the next few decades, up to and including the 1974 
Boston school boycott organized against the busing 
of black students to white schools. This backlash was 
organized politically by George Wallace in his 1 968 run 
for the White House, and then officially cultivated by 
the Republican Party in their "Southern strategy" first 
articulated by Nixon in 1968 and perfected by Ronald 
Reagan in his successful presidential campaign of 1 980. 
They made Lyndon Johnson's worst fears come true by 
creating a white multi-class racist political bloc that 
has guaranteed the national electoral hegemony of the 
Republican Party and has been a bulwark of reactionary 
politics for the last 40 years. 

With the triumph of neoliberalism over this same 
period, the capacity of the trade unions to confront the 
wave of deindustrialization, disintegrated eventually. 



The steady decline in the life conditions of workers, both 
black and white, and the consequent implosion of the 
trade unions unable to defend against this decline, is 
due in part to the failure of these unions to make com- 
mon cause with the black movement of the 1 960s. What 
was at stake was not only the future of black work- 
ers but also the soul of white workers. The defection 
of large sections of the white working class to Ronald 
Reagan and his right wing movement was not inevitable. 
It became so when labor leaders, claiming to represent 
working class interests, declared war on black mili- 
tancy and its demands. If Walter Reuther had thrown in 
his forces behind the MFDP, King and his allies would 
have certainly had to follow. This would have split the 
Democratic Party. Lyndon Johnson, at the end of the day, 
might have had to go along with the anti-racist forces, 
we might have avoided the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights 
Movement would have been reinvigorated as a coalition 
between blacks and labor, and U.S. history would have 
been altered. Of course none of this happened. 

I will leave the conclusions about current black poli- 
tics that one can draw from this to the discussion. I just 
want to add the following remark. Since 2007 we have 
entered a period of economic crisis across the entire 
capitalist world. The condition is analogous more to the 
situation of the 1930s than to the period of relative pros- 
perity of the 1950s and 1960s, which were at least pros- 
perous for white people. For a large majority of blacks 
the conditions today are pretty close to the depression 
conditions of the 1930s, although things are not yet 
that dire for white folks. The new factor is millions of 
immigrant workers from Latin America, who suffer in 
conditions similar to blacks at the moment. If a coalition 
of working-class blacks and Latinos can be forged— and 
this is a big if— then the basis of a major explosion of 
labor politics will be established. 

If a black leadership develops with the capacity to 
fuse the community aspirations of African Americans 
with the class demands of such a labor explosion, then 
there will be a basis for a black-led movement that can 
change America's future. 

Responses 

CJ: Two things differ markedly about black politics dur- 
ing the 1950s and 1960s compared to now. The first 
is Jim Crow segregation in the south and beyond the 
south. The other circumstance was the de facto segre- 
gation in the north, in terms of the racial ghetto, which 
was different from what people mean by that term now. 
In the 1940s and '50s, if you drove around Hyde Park and 
the surrounding area, you would find neighborhoods 
that were class diverse but racially homogeneous. That 
phenomenon gives way to major changes from the 
1960s onwards, as we see black suburbs pop up in dif- 
ferent parts of the country. That is significant. Indeed, 
it's an accomplishment, as is the expansion of the black 
middle class. Yet, it is this very accomplishment that 
ultimately erodes the use of some of those older racial 
justice arguments in our contemporary period. 

Consider Michelle Alexander's recent book The New 
Jim Crow— which is all the rage right now, with even 
churches studying it in groups. Of course, I am glad peo- 
ple are concerned about the rise of the prison state. At 
the same time it's not helpful, as I think even Alexander 
herself concedes at times, to talk about the rise of the 
prison state as a new form of Jim Crow. That is not what 
we are facing. We are not even facing mass incarcera- 
tion as such. Rather, I agree more with LoTc Wacquant: 
This phenomenon is hyper-, not mass, incarceration. It 
is not the case that everybody in this room or even all 
black people will spend their lives or parts of their lives 
in prison. Rather, when we look at this up close, and this 
is where historical materialism can be helpful, we are 
talking about specific neighborhoods targeted by police 
and these areas are where the majority of prisoners at a 
penitentiary like Statesville hail from. This is not whole- 
sale incarceration. That, for me, erodes the usefulness 
of a strict racial justice framework. I also don't want to 
give the impression that we should focus solely on class, 
criticize black political elites, and toss out a discussion 
of race. Rather, we need to think about class politics 
and how they manifest themselves in a racial idiom. 

MR: When you criticize black elites and say that some 
people don't even hold them responsible when they have 
power, there are two notions of power that need to be 
borne in mind. One is the power of an individual having 
some influence and links to important people. The other 
is the power of a class or a community as a collective 
force behind you. My own sense is that these black elite 
leaders lack power in this second sense. People like 
Obama have a middle-class black constituency that 
is very much behind them, but a lot of these so-called 
movers and shakers in Chicago don't have real com- 
munity support behind them. They have connections, 
sources of money, and so on, but they don't really have 
power in the sense being able to provide leadership. 
They can provide no real leadership because they're 
basically lapdogs of more powerful people who are con- 
trolling them. 

Q&A 

Would you address the divergence on the Left between 
a nationalist approach and an integrationist approach? 
Traditionally these can be thought of in terms of orga- 
nization— for instance, the Black Panthers' organizing 
separately from white activists in the early 1970s. But their 
difference can also be thought of in terms of the final goal, 
as with the black belt nation thesis, which sought some 
kind of national independence and autonomy for black 
people, as opposed to the revolutionary equality that was 
imagined by others on the Left. What are your touchstones 
with respect to this question? What are your touchstones 
from the history of Marxism? 

CJ: This notion of nationalism versus integrationism 
is anachronistic. That way of talking about African- 
American political life is dated and no longer useful. If 
we want to come up with some categories for thinking 
about African-American political life that might be help- 
ful I prefer Preston Smith's use of "racial democracy" 
and "social democracy." On the one hand, you have 
struggles that are pitched towards the protection of 
constitutional rights, particularly within this environ- 
ment in which the gains of the 1960s have been under 



assault. That co-exists with racial-uplift and self-help 
politics— easily! 

Some of the divisions that we saw historically have 
been reconciled. For instance, there was a recent sym- 
posium featuring Boyce Watkins and the Minister Louis 
Farrakhan, and I think the title was "Wealth, Education, 
Family, and Community." So there you have it, right? 
The old Black Nationalist arguments and the liberal 
integrationists have been reconciled. 

What is missing, and this is where we need much 
more public argument, has to do with social democ- 
racy. So if the racial democracy view holds that liberal 
democracy is great, but it is racist, and we need more 
black people to have access to it— that is the old liberal 
integrationist argument— that is not as radical as the 
view of social democracy, which says that whether it is 
public housing or support from the state in moments 
of economic downturns, those things should be guar- 
anteed to all people regardless of color. That is a much 
more expansive argument, and it has been made over 
and over again throughout history and has been widely 
embraced by all sorts of folks within the African-Ameri- 
can community. 

The racial justice approach seems strong in the 
abstract, as, for instance, when we talk about the likeli- 
hood of a black man getting stopped by the cops or how 
tough it is for a black man to find a cab in New York. But 
such abstractions lose their luster when you get into 
concrete politics. Let me give you one quick example: 
Some of you all may have noticed, a couple weeks back, 
Ed Gardner was trying to make a pitch to Rahm Em- 
manuel for 50 percent, I think, of the contracts coming 
out of the school closures and demolitions, as well 
as the rehabs and new buildings. 2 That fits with racial 
democracy— blacks should have access to contracting 
just as anyone else, especially if we constitute a dis- 
proportionate number of folks within the schools. The 
problem, however, is that this approach suspends criti- 
cal analysis: Why try to get a piece of the action instead 
of contesting this project that could disrupt the lives of 
thousands of kids within the Chicago Public Schools in 
ways that we can't even predict? So I think those are 
two different kinds of politics operating among Afri- 
can Americans, the one that says "Cut us in. Give us a 
chance to participate in the same way," and another 
approach which contests the contemporary arrange- 
ment and calls for something that is more expansive, 
redistributive, and democratic. 

MR: Historically there has always been an element of 
national oppression involved in the oppression of black 
people in the United States. They have been oppressed 
as a nationality— as a people, not just individually or as 
a caste. The push back to that is to demand community 
power. 

Unfortunately, sometimes the struggle against 
national oppression takes the perspective of a kind 
of Utopian separatism. That is perhaps an inevitable 
sentiment, but it is ultimately a futile one. Because in a 
society this complicated and this integrated, economi- 
cally and socially, separate communities in that sense 
are inconceivable. It would only make sense if society 
were actually falling apart. And this was, in fact, a lot of 
the analysis of the Black Nationalists in the 1960s and 
1 970s. Many among them assumed that white society 
was falling apart, it was collapsing, in any case, it was 
going to chaos, and African Americans have to save 
themselves by building their own society, building barri- 
ers against the craziness and the corruption and the rot 
outside. But that analysis was wrong. The white society, 
the dominant society, may be in a lot of trouble. There 
may be a lot of injustice. But it is not collapsing. It's not 
going to disappear in the next period, and therefore, 
strict separatism doesn't make any sense. On the other 
hand, you have to understand that the notion of com- 
munity power and community control is genuine and 
remains crucial to the black struggle. 

Marxism is a framework, both my framework and 
Cedric's framework. It's not a view that leads to posi- 
tion, as such, since it is not a politics. Various politics 
can fit within that framework and there's always a lot to 
dispute. In the political sense I am a pragmatist. If poli- 
tics just doesn't accomplish real goals then it might be 
fine in theory, but it's useless, really. For me Marxism 
has always been a framework within which to analyze 
things. Of course, that framework leads me to think of 
the working class as a prime moving force in history 
and the prime force for social change under capitalism. 
I still believe that. There is no other force capable of 
transforming capitalism. But, beyond that, the particu- 
lar politics of Marxism depend a great deal on the cir- 
cumstances, the conjuncture, the country you are in, the 
circumstances you are in, and so on. 

My question concerns community oppression and com- 
munity politics or community empowerment and the con- 
nection to racial/ethnic politics. You both talked about the 
transformation of these politics with respect to the Demo- 
cratic Party from the period leading up to the Civil Rights 
Movement and after. Has the Democratic Party operated 
as a vehicle for community politics in the United States in a 
way that the Republican Party has not? 

MR: As to the Democratic Party, the politics is compli- 
cated by the fact that the Republican Party has orga- 
nized a racist, white multi-class racial bloc that anchors 
its popular appeal and hegemony. Even though Clinton, 
Carter, and Obama were elected as Presidents in the 
last 40 years, the Republicans really have a national 
electoral hegemony. They control things and set the 
agenda even when the Democrats hold the presidency. 
They set the agenda because they have organized this 
bloc from which the Democrats are excluded by defini- 
tion. The Democrats have their own political machine— 
we can see that in Chicago— their own combines, which 
operate very effectively at the city level and certain state 
levels. But if you want to oppose the white racial block 
you have to do it within the Democratic Party. The strat- 
egy of taking over or splitting the Democratic Party from 
the left, however, has no real basis in society. Still, as a 
way of fighting the most racist and right wing elements 
it does have some logic. What are black communities 
going to do, run as Republicans? I mean, if you are going 
to have any kind of representation whatsoever, in Con- 
gress or in the legislature, and if it is going to be at all 

"Black politics" continues on page 4 



Issue #57 /June 2013 



Black politiCS, continued from page 3 

progressive and anti-racist, it is going to be Democrat. 
That is the fact we are dealing with. The dilemma is that 
the Democratic Part is not a way for the Left or for the 
black movement to advance any deep agenda. But in the 
short run, as a defensive maneuver to fight the racists, 
it might very well be a tool, at least locally, that you have 
to use. 

CJ: I want to introduce the question of talking about 
class politics in a racial idiom. This is something I take 
from Preston Smith's work, Racial Democracy and the 
Black Metropolis. It is really a straightforward proposi- 
tion, as I see it, though it is an approach to black politics 
that has been lost, both popularly and in academia. If 
you go back and read Jim Crow-era social scientists— 
Abram Harris, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, even E. 
Franklin Frazier and Carter G. Woodson— all of them 
offer an analysis of black politics that looks at it in its 
full expanse. They address how class manifests itself 
among African-Americans. 

One thing that happens within such discussions, 
particularly in our own time, is that we conflate race 
and class. There is a tendency to use race as the sym- 
bolic language of class. It used to drive me crazy when 
I taught at a small liberal arts college where many stu- 
dents automatically equated "black" with "poor." They 
saw black people as being synonymous with poverty and 
they had no understanding of African-American life be- 
yond that kind of image they got from pop culture. So, I 
tried to talk to them about Bronzeville, or about the fact 
that even in the small community that I grew up in in 
the 1970s and 1980s in Louisiana, we had black banks, 
black doctors, and black lawyers. The idea that there is 
an integral aspect of African-American life was some- 
thing new to them. The task for us, and this is what I 
was trying to lay out before, is to talk about those differ- 
ences. 

Race is not the same as class. When we talk about 
class we talk about particular roles that people play, 
their specific relationship to production in our society. 
Race has its origins in slavery and imperialist expan- 
sion. But, ultimately, when we look at contemporary Af- 
rican-American politics, we need to address how com- 
munities are organized and how particular kinds of poli- 
tics and sets of interests emerge. This flows from what 
I said at the very beginning about the disappearance of 
critical public engagement among African-Americans: 
I grew up along the Interstate 10 corridor— most of my 
family was in either Louisiana, Houston, or Mobile. Most 
of the people whom I learned from as a kid had grown 
up under Jim Crow. The teachers I had as far as high 
school were largely people who had taught at the old 
Jim Crow high schools in the area. They talked about 
class. They didn't talk about it in the ways that academ- 
ics talk about it. They had their own vocabularies for 
the differences of opinion and interests among African- 
Americans. And the discussions were often quite candid. 
Some of that has since disappeared. You hear it every 
now and again in, for example, the use of the term 
"Uncle Tom," which was one that I heard constantly as a 
kid. I recall adult conversations in the other room: They 
were talking about local politics, they were talking about 
people they knew personally, and they weren't afraid to 
call these people out when their politics were out of step 
with the broader community of mostly working class 
African Americans. That kind of internal criticism has 
evaporated by and large. So why do we no longer have 
those forms of public engagement, analysis of everyday 
forms? Why have they evaporated? 

MR: The discussion of class has not only dried up in the 
African-American community, but in the white commu- 
nity as well, including among white workers. There is a 
notion that everybody is now middle class. If you have a 
decent job you're now middle class, not working class. 
So an entire terminology has disappeared. Or, if it hasn't 
disappeared, it has deteriorated because of the absence 
of a left in this country. One of the functions of the Left, 
according to Marx, is to raise these issues. We haven't 
had an effective Left for some time, so that this kind of 
talk, these kinds of class discussions, have tended to 
disappear from public view and even from private con- 
versations. I remember at the time of the Civil Rights 
Movement in the 1950s and 1960s and of the League 
of Black Revolutionary Workers in Detroit in the 1970s, 
when there was a surge in working class militancy, 
especially amongst black workers but also amongst 
whites, this terminology of class did arise. It was the 
way people talked, even right-wingers. It became part of 
the conversation, the hegemonic vernacular, if you will. 
But it has tended to disappear in our society. 

It would seem that politics thought of in terms of the 
"black community" and "white community" points to 
earlier failures of what was termed the "revolutionary 
integrationist" project. It seems that the radicalism of that 
vision— that black people wouldn't just be incorporated 
into a society that didn't otherwise change, but that inte- 
gration necessitate wider social transformation— has been 
lost. Similarly lost is the recognition of the crisis of liberal- 
ism that was expressed by Jim Crow, a crisis that was not 
itself overcome with the dismantling of Jim Crow. Is this 
language of black and white communities the best that we 
can think of now? Are we content to naturalize that there is 
a black community and that it has its own politics? Where 
does this leave the question of the political leadership of 
society? Doesn't an exclusive preoccupation with the black 
community actually threaten to limit our political horizon? 

Hasn't the project of social democracy in the United States 
always had racism woven into it, from the New Deal to the 
Great Society? This seems to complicate Preston Smith's 
contrast between racial democracy versus social democ- 
racy. The critique of racism attained some of its most radi- 
cal forms in variants of revolutionary Black Nationalism. I 
am curious about that strain of black politics and its place 
on the Left, especially in light of the Obama administra- 
tion's designation ofAssata Shakur, who was considered a 
central figure for part of the Black Liberation Army during 
the 1970s and 1980s, as the most wanted fugitive on the 
FBI's list. Obviously, there are various political consider- 
ations involved in that decision, but in some ways it rep- 
resents a symbolic culmination ofCOINTELPRO. Can we 
not say that the military defeat of revolutionary nationalist 
politics has opened up the space for, and legitimacy of, the 



more integrationist politics that Obama represents? Where 
do we understand the place of Black Nationalism, particu- 
larly that strain of it engaged with Marxism? 

When I first read The Souls of Black Folk, I was im- 
pressed with the way Du Bois spoke with such high praise 
of the use of military force in the South, of Reconstruction 
asa military proy'ecf imposed upon the South. If Recon- 
struction was the height of black politics in the history of 
the United States, if it was the most progressive time in the 
history of this country, what would it mean for us to actu- 
ally have a politics that worked at that level, with elections 
forcing the key political issues of the day, as opposed to 
what we have now, where the president is just a symbolic 
figure? Mel has pointed out that he thinks the major task is 
the question of jobs, and it certainly was the major issue in 
the last election, if it isn 't the major issue in all elections. 
What is the significance of the fact that the black commu- 
nity is used as a surplus labor force alongside immigrant 
labor? 

MR: Yes, community politics can be narrow and pro- 
vincial. On the other hand, when you have oppressed 
communities who have no power, you are going to have 
resistance, you are going to have community-based pol- 
itics. This just seems to be a natural social law. You can- 
not be dismissive towards those local political struggles 
just because they are local. 

Generally, one aspect that must be understood is that 
the ideas of the revolutionary Black Nationalists influ- 
enced the white left tremendously in this country. They 
were very important in the New Communist Movement 
and in the white left. The New Communist Movement 
has vanished in a way that the debates of those times, 
which were occasioned by these revolutionary Black Na- 
tionalists' ideas, has been forgotten and lost, and that is 
too bad, because it was a very important and fundamen- 
tal debate. The African-American struggle is— at least 
one aspect of it is— national. Blacks are a nationally 
oppressed group, and revolutionary Black Nationalism 
emerges out of that aspect of the reality of the struggle, 
as an attempt to integrate responses to the national 
oppression and the class oppression. Some such inte- 
gration, in terms of theory and praxis, is crucial if you're 
interested in building any kind of revolutionary move- 
ment. 

Du Bois's book on Black Reconstruction is to me the 
high point of Marxist analysis of that period. But I am 
not sure the issue of violence is central. The issue there 
was of democratic self-rule, basically, where the plant- 
ers had mobilized a force of violence to crush demo- 
cratic self-rule and they fought back. The controversy 
is whether they could have made it or what allies they 
needed to sustain the Reconstruction project and avoid 
defeat. There is no doubt that if they were going to do 
that they would have to employ armed struggle, because 
they were under armed attack. 

CJ: I actually try to refrain from using the categories 
black community/white community, partially because 
when we encounter them within political rhetoric, or 
even in earlier historical debates, what they refer to is a 
constituency that someone claims to represent. I try to 
avoid that as much as possible. Certainly there are black 
communities, black neighborhoods, but I think whenev- 
er we hear them talked about in that broad sense, I have 
a problem with it, because of its political implications. 

Of course, the New Deal was limited and social se- 
curity did not cover domestics and sharecroppers. I 
am clear on that; I don't have a problem about thinking 
through that historically. The problem I have, though, 
is that this sometimes provides an exit, provides a way 
to say, "You know what, unlike Scandinavian societies, 
we've got to deal with race and therefore social democ- 
racy is not going to work here in the United States." 
When we look at the broader history, despite the racism, 
there are all sorts of instances of popular struggles that 
are multiracial. 

I don't really know what to make of Obama and As- 
sata Shakur. I suspect it has more to do with Cuba. I am 
always leery whenever someone mentions the Black 
Panther Party. I think that the Black Panthers Party, in 
and it of itself, was limited. I am glad Mel brought up 
the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. There is 
a whole pantheon of radical organizations during that 
period that needs to be discussed and debated, but 
ultimately, we have to really think about what modes of 
organizing are appropriate in our own moment. 

The question of jobs is the thread that connects a 
lot of what we have talked about, whether it is the rise 
of the right or the emergence of the new Democrats, 
because they have all helped to further this project of 
neoliberalism in different ways. Speaking broadly about 
the Left, I don't think we've come up with effective ways 
of wrestling with neoliberalization. First of all, it is a 
complicated process; it is tough to summarize. You can 
certainly talk about the rejection of social democracy, 
the rejection of the planned state, but what it looks like 
on the ground sometimes is much more difficult for 
people to get a sense of. 

I think too many of us have gotten caught up in the 
shadow theater of symbolic presidential candidacies 
and whether or not Obama is being offended by the Tea 
Party, and whether we should get upset about it, instead 
of tackling those kinds of issues that might be included 
under this notion of neoliberalism. Also, and this is 
where I disagree with Mel, I actually don't think the 
answer is jobs. We are still stuck in a moment in which 
we want to focus on job creation even though there has 
been vast technological change that has made some 
jobs completely worthless and monotonous, work that 
nobody really wants to do. The biggest task is for us to 
rethink what kind of society we want instead of thinking 
in the short term about how to recreate jobs that once 
existed. 

If you go back and take a look at James Boggs's 
American Revolution, a book that came out in 1963, there 
is a key passage where he begins to talk about the kinds 
of problems that automation would create within soci- 
ety. He is writing about it as somebody who works in the 
Chrysler plant in Detroit, with respect to the changes 
that are happening within the plant— how it is intensify- 
ing racism as people become more and more insecure 
about their jobs in the factory, and how it is creating 
more of a conservative mood among the UAW folks who 



are now in a posture of negotiation under technological 
change. He describes in a few sentences the next 40 
years of American history. What he basically says is that 
the changes produced by automation and technological 
change more generally are going to produce a society 
in which people are basically disposable and rely upon 
the state in order to survive. He talks about people be- 
ing untouchables— essentially he is talking about those 
black men that he sees more and more often on the 
street corners of Detroit. They have no possibility of 
being incorporated into factory production. Boggs ulti- 
mately says that what we need to do is get beyond the 
focus on jobs and begin to talk about a society in which 
we are no longer organizing our daily lives around the 
dogma of work. Ultimately, I think that is where we need 
to go, from a question of how we patch up society by 
creating minimum wage jobs in the short term, to how 
we create a society in which there are no disposable 
people. 

Reflecting on this conversation, I am reminded why Platy- 
pus on the one hand says, "The Left is dead, " and on the 
other hand is dedicated to facilitating the development 
of conditions for the revitalization of the Left. Part of the 
way I am thinking about this panel is, "black politics in the 
age of Obama, " but also, "black politics after Obama. " We 
are historically faced with the question of whether we live 
in a post-racial society. Answers in the affirmative are, 
on one level, a manifest tie, and yet they do seem to be 
descriptively accurate of a highly conservative overcoming 
of the question of race, in that the question of what kind of 
politics would be adequate to the question of race, in our 
epoch, has now simply become unclear. 

Part of the reason we look to the American Civil War 
is because of its centrality to the history of the Left. The 
transformative moment of the 19 ,h century is undoubt- 
edly the rise of the Republican Party, the Union s victory 
in Reconstruction, and the arming of black soldiers and 
the army as a whole to uproot slavery with blood and iron. 
Mel was talking about the way in which questions of race 
seemed in the moment of 1964 to promise a reconfigura- 
tion of American politics in the 20 th century, a real opening 
up of democratic possibilities by provoking a crisis within 
the prevailing, depoliticizing Democratic-Republican dy- 
namic of the post-WWII period. Cedric has talked about 
the bad legacy of the 1960s— the specters of the 1960s and 
1970s. How are we to begin to push on the question of race 
on the Left, in order to overcome the rotten legacies that 
lead to our own present incapacity to reconstitute a force 
that can change society? 

CJ: Let me tackle this question of post-racialism first. 
I think there is a tendency to equate it with the right- 
wing, colorblind, neoliberal posture, but I think there 
is some truth to claims of post-racialism. What some 
people mean by it is that we are post-Jim Crow segre- 
gation, that there has been some racial progress in the 
country. Yet, I think it is overstated to say that because 
we now have an African-American president, racism 
is somehow a thing of the past. There is a problem in 
the way people talk about progress in this country; it 
seems we have been unable to think through how it is 
that oppression and suffering continue even in the midst 
of progress. That some sort of progress has occurred 
is evident in the fact that we have now seen, as we said 
before, the expansion of the black middle class and the 
emergence of blacks within all areas of American life, 
to a meaningful extent, even if this has not occurred 
on terms that are always equal to whites. These facts, 
these aspects of sociological reality, are implied within 
the post-racial rhetoric. Of course, I reject all the right- 
wing politics that often goes along with those claims. I 
hope that what we have begun to do in this conversation 
is think through the meaning of these changes: the 
emergence of an expansive black middle class and, with 
it, the emergence of a black political elite which is part 
of the local corporate political bloc in any given city. 
Even nationally, I think we are living in and through a 
period in which black people are not just add-ons, but 
an important sector of a ruling class. That is something 
that has to be reconciled, or reckoned with, in any for- 
midable and effective leftist politics. 

We have talked about the decomposition of labor in 
this country, and with that we have to think seriously 
about what the working class looks like now in concrete 
terms, a concern that is easy to lose track of. There is 
a tendency to get caught up in metanarratives without 
looking at the specifics. We have to broaden the spec- 
trum of what the American working class is, because 
there is still a tendency both within the popular discus- 
sion but also within certain corners of the Left to settle 
on an almost Archie Bunker-type notion of the working 
class— industrial, racist, and ass-backwards— when it 
actually looks very different in reality. We need to not 
only think about it in a different way but also to begin 
organizing accordingly. 

We have to sharpen our understanding of who con- 
stitutes the working class and also jettison the focus on 
electoral politics, which has been an undercurrent in 
this conversation. While instrumental voting is neces- 
sary and we should all participate, especially where 
we think our participation makes some difference, the 
struggle that we want entails other kinds of organiz- 
ing—and, it should be said, Occupy does not appear 
to have been adequate. To put it provocatively, I do not 
think we can really view Occupy as a movement. It was 
a series of demonstrations that were powerful and 
important in terms of galvanizing public attention to 
the question of inequality in society, but it was largely 
inadequate. The talk about the "ninety-nine percent" is 
a good slogan— much like "Change you can believe in." 
But neither offers an analysis that clarifies what class 
actually looks like in this moment. 

MR: Within all these changes we've talked about, some 
facts remain. When you talk about any kind of working 
class movement, you need to talk about women, Lati- 
nos, and blacks, who are going to compose the move- 
ment. Yet white workers, especially older, white, male 
workers who by-and-large have reactionary politics, 
are a problem for the Left and a problem for the work- 
ing class movement because they dominate the trade 
unions, as well as the working class communities in 
which they live. They have a social force that goes be- 
yond their numbers. 

So we have to re-conceptualize the working class 
in a much broader way. But when you do that you have 



to understand the variety of the working class— why 
women workers and black male workers are not the 
same, how different groups of workers have their own 
interests, aside from their broad class interest, which 
are really important to them. It is in that context that the 
black movement is going to have to play a special role. 
Historically, it has been the most militant movement 
that has ever challenged the basis of American society. 
There is no reason to expect that is going to change. 
That does not mean that the black movement by itself 
is going to make a revolution. It is not. It is pretty clear 
now that the Black Nationalist initiatives, however well- 
motivated they were, did not succeed in liberating the 
black masses. 

We need a black leadership that can mobilize and 
organize the black masses; until that happens, I am 
afraid there is not going to be a general progressive 
movement that is capable of changing much, and that is 
unfortunate. It is a pessimistic scenario. The objective 
possibilities are there, the history and the traditions are 
there, but other factors that were mentioned are miti- 
gating against truly progressive social transformation- 
changes in work, and the fact that there is now a large 
black middle class, which does play a conservative role 
and has an impact on working class people. So, I am 
not all that optimistic, but I still believe that without a 
black movement based in the working class, the pos- 
sibility of a real social change in the United States is 
foreclosed. IP 



1 . Harold Cruse, "Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro- 
American," in Rebellion or Revolution? Edited by Cedric Johnson 
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 74-96. 

2. Fran Spielman, "Ed Gardner: Black Contractors Should Get 
Half of CPS Schools Renovation Work," Chicago Sun-Times 
4/9/2013, available at <http://www.suntimes.com/news/city- 
hall/1 9380322-41 8/ed-gardner-black-contractors-should-get- 
half-of-the-cps-schools-renovation-work.html>. 



Conversations, continued from page 2 



The Left often ends up in a defensive position: it pushes to 
keep wages at their current state, or defends certain social 
rights like healthcare. Can we really call that politics, if the 
Left is wedged in a position where it is essentially defend- 
ing the status quo? 

BS: I agree that the response to austerity on the Left has 
been defensive, but I think it is tactically defensive. A 
defensive politics towards the welfare state, if it's part of 
a broader program, can be useful. More political defeats 
now, in terms of greater austerity, will just put the Left 
and the working class in a tougher position to fight back 
in the future. So we can't have offensive ends unless we 
win the defensive struggle now. 

JT: I would argue something different. It is clear that 
anti-austerity politics ends up repeating old Keynesian 
debates. You get shock troops coming out saying "we 
want a million climate change jobs!" But they expect 
to be defeated so that they can be radicalized. I don't 
think the problem is defensiveness. The emergence of 
a socialist workers' movement is, as they used to put 
it in the Second International, the founding myth. The 
workers' movement preexisted what we call socialism. 
It took the form of mass trade unions in England; they 
were defensive organizations. You obviously have people 
saying that we need more than just trade union rights, 
but that is about as far as it goes. What about coopera- 
tives? That used to be thought of as a foundation. I am 
not saying cooperatives are a road to socialism. They are 
an occasional waiting post on the way to socialism, but 
they are all fundamentally part of the working class's 
defense against economic attacks. 

BB: The issue is not best characterized by the defen- 
siveness of the Left in anti-austerity politics. However, 
I would make a distinction between the early socialist 
movement and the workers' movement. If you charac- 
terize the workers' movement as simply defensive or 
founded upon the workers' need to defend themselves 
against the intensive exploitation that came around 
with industrialization, you capture only part of what was 
going on. How we characterize the organized working 
class as a constituent element in the developmental 
trajectory of society is important, because it wasn't sim- 
ply founded on defense. It was constituted, meaning that 
people who lived outside of society, in the shantytowns 
around Manchester, were taken and made actual con- 
stituents of society. To use some Platypus jargon, they 
were made into bourgeois subjects. By allowing them 
to participate in the sale of their labor on equal terms, 
they were given the rights that the bourgeoisie had al- 
ready given itself. That was the foundation of bourgeois 
citizenry. 

I think the context in which a reformist struggle oc- 
curs is essential and this is exactly the argument Rosa 
Luxemburg puts forth. She is often characterized, in an 
obnoxious way, as a revolutionary counterposing herself 
to reformists. From the very first paragraph of Reform or 
Revolution, she says the opposite, that it is the reform- 
ists who separate reform from revolution. The point is 
that reforms achieved in the context of advancing the 
socialist workers' movement are very different from 
reforms achieved in the context of the unchallenged 
dominance of the status quo. We have to account for 
that distinction, even if you don't want to go as far as 
Platypus and recognize the historical discontinuity. IP 



Issue #57 /June 2013 



Conversations on the Left 

What is to be done? 

Bhaskar Sunkara, James TurLey, and Ben Blumberg 



On April 18 ,h , 2013, the Platypus Affiliated Society or- 
ganized a conversation at New York University between 
Bhaskar Sunkara, the editor of Jacobin, James Turleyof 
the Communist Party of Great Britain, and Ben Blumberg 
of Platypus, to discuss the differences and similarities 
between their organizations. What follows is an edited 
transcript of the discussion. 



Bhaskar Sunkara: It is impossible to deny that the 
Communist Party of Great Britain's (CPGB) Weekly 
Worker is an important publication. It is a publication 
that is right about many things, without a doubt more 
right than their peers on the British left, and their ideas 
deserve more engagement, so I am very pleased that 
Platypus has us together on this panel. There is no reg- 
ular party publication on the American left that comes 
close to the Weekly Worker's competence, especially 
considering the small size and resources of the CPGB. 
They have been consistently against the perversion of 
democratic centralism and lack of accountability by the 
leadership in groups like the Socialist Workers' Party 
(SWP). I have been reading it for a couple of years and 
I think they have a really nuanced view of Trotskyism's 
legacy. They also have a solid critique of Eurocommu- 
nism and other coalition politics. What I like most of all 
is their openness about their small size and their lim- 
ited influence as an organization. For someone like me, 
who has been around the Left and its posturing, we at 
Jacobin think the Weekly Worker is far more refreshing 
and useful than organs that herald the coming of every 
new socialist movement as if it is going to resurrect the 
Left. Platypus's approach is also sometimes useful on 
this point. Jacobin doesn't share the same politics, but 
only because we are operating in different contexts. We 
aim to reach a different audience. Jacobin, as a politi- 
cal project, is a publication that cannot substitute for 
the role of a political organization or the role of a party. 
It also cannot have the uncompromising and coherent 
vision and perspective of a propaganda group. And it is 
subject to lots of different pressures and forces— such 
as the market and the petty-bourgeois culture of writing 
and publishing. 

Our different orientations affect whom we are trying 
to reach. Jacobin was always two projects. It is some- 
thing of an intra-left project: emphasizing a Marxist 
perspective towards organization building. But our main 
project has been an outwardly directed one: engaging 
with American liberalism. We have always been geared 
towards the general public. We are liberals articulat- 
ing radical ideas and we do so in a way that is clear and 
accessible. If we have any measure of mainstream suc- 
cess, it is intentional. We have sought to be a terrain for 
deep theoretical debates. It has been said that we are 
visible reminders of a long-forgotten socialist tradition, 
which would define us politically somewhere in between 
Leninism and the Democratic Socialists of America. One 
result of this is that the level of politicization of Jacobin's 
readership is not quite the same as the level of politici- 
zation of our editors, and you could probably say there 
is a lot more political parity between the readership and 
the editors of the Weekly Worker and the Platypus Re- 
view. 

James Turley: The CPGB is not a party. It doesn't exist; 
it is a name. The name comes from the older official 
communist party that has since wound up. The name 
represents an ideal that we look towards. The far left 
is divided into small propaganda circles and some of 
them deny that they do propaganda. The SWP would 
be a good example; the International Socialist Orga- 
nization (ISO] is another. They think they are talking to 
the masses, but it is bad propaganda reaching a mass 
audience. The CPGB identifies openly as a propaganda 
group and so probably would the International Bolshe- 
vik Tendency (IBT) or the Spartacist League. So there is 
a very similar landscape out of which the CPGB of the 
1920s was formed. The original CPGB was formed from 
one wing of the Socialist Labour Party, which was a kind 
of syndicalist sect, and the large majority of the British 
Socialist party. At that time, it was a far-left Marxist sect 
rather than the mass party form that existed in conti- 
nental Europe. Along with the South Wales committee, 
their forces together totaled about four to five thousand. 
If you add up the people in Britain today committed to 
some form of socialist revolution, you get a ballot figure 
of about five thousand. After 70-90 intervening years we 
are, in a sense, back where we started. That says some- 
thing about the 20 ,h century. 

But in the 1920s there were sharp tactical polem- 
ics between leftists who were, nevertheless, able to 
come together and vote on issues like whether affilia- 
tions would be sold to the Labour Party. They were able 
to make such decisions without watering down their 
overall political orientation, and that is fundamentally 
what we seek today. We argue for the unity of Marxists 
around a Marxist program even though the result would 
be something small and socially insignificant. Nonethe- 
less, we would be in a far better position to grow rapidly 
and to spread socialist and communist ideas throughout 
society. 

There is also the matter of what we inherit from the 
20 th century. The old CPGB was effectively a left-Stalin- 
ist party under the influence of the Turkish Communist 
Party. So our heritage is a kind of hard Marxism-Le- 
ninism, but we take distance from the Soviet Union and 
the rest of the Stalinist bloc. In that sense, there was 
a certain formal similarity to the Spartacus League or 
Workers' World Party (WWP), with the harder defenses 
of Trotskyism. Obviously, this is not our political orien- 
tation today; we have not become Trotskyists. We see 
that Trotskyism was a profoundly positive thing in that 
it rejected the notion of socialism in one country. It also 
rejected the dictatorship of the bureaucracy. Trotskyists 



of the 1920s, '30s, and '40s were broadly on the correct 
side of certain struggles. On the other hand, we see 
Trotsky's Transitional Program as inadequate and econo- 
mist. It creates two lines on the spontaneous develop- 
ment of consciousness, leading either to reformism or 
a kind of strange ultimate-ist, sect-like obsession with 
this text from the 1930s. 

We are often categorized as Neo-Kautskyists. For us, 
Karl Kautsky was a highly important figure, effectively 
the chief historian of the Second International and also 
an intellectual hit man for August Bebel. He wrote 
the most sustained defenses of mainstream strategy 
of the Second International that we are trying to save 
from historical oblivion. Today's self-identified Leninist 
groups have come to see a severe break between Lenin 
and the Second International. But the Leninist rejection 
of this whole tradition is misconceived. Lenin was a key 
figure in the mainstream faction of the Second Interna- 
tional, the center faction led by Kautsky, and if there is 
anything distinctive about him and his faction of Bolshe- 
viks, it is that they were the most politically muscular 
defenders of what was, quite simply, orthodoxy. Lars Lih 
characterizes Lenin as "aggressively unoriginal." We are 
trying to recover that unoriginality, because it was part 
of an overall strategy of the emergence of genuinely 
mass parties committed to socialist revolution. I feel 
like we are winning that particular historical battle. It is 
hard to tell at this point because there are still relatively 
substantial revolutionary groups that are committed 
to bearing a kind of hard Leninism. But very few new 
groups are being formed, and when splits happen, they 
tend to produce further, ever smaller, Trotskyist combat 
organizations. That produces a tendency for an equal 
yet opposite misinterpretation of Lenin, which is that 
he built a broad organization that everyone could come 
into. We like to call that the "politics of the swamp": ev- 
eryone can come in and paddle their feet in the swamp. 
But this strategy runs into its own contradictions and 
the whole thing falls apart. In fact, the Bolsheviks, like 
the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), were pro- 
grammatically defined in an extremely sharp way— in 
ways that were designed to cause divisions. The Erfurt 
Programme of the SPD, the Program of the Parti Ou- 
vrier in France, and the Bolshevik plan were written in 
ways to exclude anarchists and cause splits. 

On the Weekly Worker, our flagship: The original 
CPGB paper, the Daily Worker, was nicknamed the "Daily 
Miracle," in the sense of the improbability of its publica- 
tion. I tend to call our paper the "Weekly Miracle." It is 
run on a shoestring budget by a small, dedicated volun- 
teer staff. It carries forward the type of culture that we 
want: a culture of open polemics. There is a reason why 
we start off with two pages of letters. We do not want 
to present a show of everyone agreeing with us. That 
would be ridiculous. On the other hand, that doesn't 
come at the cost of us having a clear editorial line. We 
will absolutely concede our political hardness in the way 
that Lenin and his comrades would have done. We are 
not afraid to ruffle a few feathers and bruise a few egos. 
I haven't gone into a lot of the meat of the dispute be- 
tween ourselves and Platypus, which focuses on rather 
more obscure questions like the relationship between 
philosophy and history. But we don't have an official 
party philosophy or an official party philosopher and we 
don't think there should be one. That doesn't mean we 
are indifferent to such matters, but we are more focused 
on history as a kind of empirical record, or a record of 
projects that have attempted to transform society. It is 
safe to say that they have all failed eventually but, as 
Samuel Beckett may have put it, some failed better than 
others. 

Ben Blumberg: What distinguishes Platypus is the 
question of history. This means something different for 
Platypus than it does for the CPGB, although in both 
cases, it is a question of historical consciousness. I am 
not including Jacobin, not because I think history is ines- 
sential for them, but because Jacobin is probably less 
likely to be accused of being an antiquarian society in 
the way that Platypus and the CPGB are. 

The idea that history is an empirical record that 
serves as a balance sheet on the attempts by leftists 
of the past to overcome capitalism, displays a lack of 
awareness about the break in continuity between past 
and present. In some of the exchanges between Platy- 
pus and the IBT, a distinction was made between his- 
torical continuity projects, such as theirs, in contrast to 
Platypus's idea of historical memory. Granted, once one 
begins to move from the former to the latter, we get into 
a terrain that is less concrete and more philosophical, 
or, as one of our recent detractors has described it, "ob- 
scurantist idealism." But historical memory for Platypus 
has to do with the way our moment is conditioned by 
what was possible at an earlier time: namely, eman- 
cipation from capitalism. This once present possibility 
has today become interred under a century or more of 
historical failure. 

There is a fundamental distinction between our no- 
tion of historical failure and the CPGB's understanding 
of the same phenomenon. For us, the problem is not 
that past actors had the wrong politics, as the CPGB 
would argue. Instead, the problem is one of conscious- 
ness: What undergirds the attempts at emancipa- 
tion? What is the consciousness that gives rise to the 
workers' movement? This is why we emphasize the 
critique of Marxism. What has been most fundamental 
to the history of Marxism is the attempt at deepening 
the consciousness generated by the misfortunes and 
maladies of bourgeois society. For Marxists— and this 
is very clearly enunciated in the figures that we treat as 
foundational: Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky— histori- 
cal defeats are only damning for the movement if we do 
not learn from them. Luxemburg, for example, explicitly 
said that the collapse of the Second International in 



1914 would only be a loss if no lessons were extracted 
from it. 

To bring it around to the idea of historical disconti- 
nuity, Platypus contends that these lessons have not 
been learned. We want to hold at bay the Chomskyan 
approach to the history of Marxism, where it is simply a 
matter of telling people what they don't know. Because 
we haven't learned from our failures, historical condi- 
tions have changed, particularly in terms of the pos- 
sibility for consciousness. Like the CPGB, we are not a 
political party, but for different reasons. James probably 
wouldn't characterize our historical moment as "pre- 
political" in the way that we would. 

So we characterize our project in this negative sense. 
It is not a matter of telling people that this is what his- 
torical consciousness looked like back then, and we 
need to aspire to its reproduction in the present. Rather, 
we teach Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky to make visible 
the contours of what is missing. And that is why we con- 
sider ourselves a "pre-political" project. We think that 
there needs to be recognition of what is absent in our 
historical moment. We are in a "pre-political moment" 
because of the absence of consciousness that once ex- 
isted. 

Responses 

BS: My perspective is more empirical. History is fact, 
and I think useful history is grounded in social history. I 
would agree that the history of the Left is the history of 
failure, but I think that it is a combination of bad objec- 
tive social and economic conditions with poor political 
responses to these conditions. One of the key differenc- 
es is that I think there is room for actual politics today. I 
can somewhat understand Platypus's objection to that. 
There is a lot of noise and "movementism," and the Left 
is an echo chamber. But there are relevant, operative 
politics for us to engage in, even if the Left today is in a 
worse position than it has been in the past. Still: Trade 
union activity is politics. Anti-austerity work is politics. 
The anti-war movement is politics. 

JT: I don't think that the current moment is "pre-polit- 
ical." That strikes me as difficult to reconcile with the 
fact that there is simply, in obvious ways, politics going 
on. In Britain, the trade union movement is at its abso- 
lute historical weakest. We are back to almost the be- 
ginning of mass trade unionism in terms of union den- 
sity, but we still have mass demonstrations organized 
by the unions and the left of the unions. Sometimes, 
arguing with Platypus, it feels like this discontinuity 
stance is their dinosaur Marx, as if a comet landed and 
all the dinosaurs died or became birds, as if everybody 
was wiped out by an incomprehensible natural catastro- 
phe. But what happened was a serious development. It 
seems like an impossible situation, like a chicken-and- 
egg scenario, in which we can't have mass organizations 
because we don't have the historical consciousness that 
mass organization brings into being. There is no other 
way to solve the problem than to work through the con- 
crete history, through an intellectual frame that would 
be less abstractly philosophical. I wouldn't conceive of 



weekly- J££ 

worker 



the task in terms of critigue, but rather in terms of sci- 
ence, which I would consider an objective, critical form 
of knowledge. 

BB: The question of science, I think, is one of the main 
tripping points for the Left. Certainly Platypus, both 
externally and internally, finds itself embroiled in these 
questions about "scientific socialism" and Marx's con- 
cepts in relation to the natural sciences. Is Marxism a 
science? Did Marx advance science itself, or is this cat- 
egory a lot of bunk? Platypus maintains that the ques- 
tion of science for Marx and Marxism is derived from a 
different meaning of the word than is used in the natural 
sciences. It is implied in the particular way in which 
historical research is conducted; what characterizes the 
"scientific" in Marxism is the self-conscious reflecting 
on the conditions of its own possibility. 

On the notion of discontinuity: The possibility of praxis 
today is largely assumed, whereas we would put it in 
the form of a question. Is it really the case that an ex- 
ploitative system that is raised by mendacious politics 
leads to social discontent, and that is just the natural 
way of politics? One of the reasons I think that idea can 
be rejected is that exploitation is not new to our histori- 
cal epoch. Yet the question of emancipatory politics is 
historically specific to the era of the bourgeoisie. For 
Platypus, the question of discontinuity rests on the 
perplexity that one has to face when one begins to inte- 
grate the conditions of possibility and praxis today. We 
approach those conditions as something that can only 
be glimpsed when one delves into how they were under- 
stood historically. To paraphrase Trotsky, you can stand 
at the side of a river, but the water doesn't stop flowing: 
The history of the objective conditions has changed. It 
is common to hear strange assertions and questions 
about the nature of the social order today, such as "is it 
really even mediated by the wage-laborer?" This points 
to just how opaque society has become. 

I don't think Platypus would exist if we just thought 
that politics was absolutely impossible. In fact, we do 
what we do precisely because we think it is possible. 
The question is: What is it going to take to get from here 
to there? 

JT: The "scientificity" of Marxism would be scientific 
socialism based on the materialist conception of history, 
which, to me, is a kind of minimal point in itself: It is the 
idea that history is something that we can apprehend 
and thus actually transform. There is obviously an ele- 
ment of reflection on the conditions of existence, but 
the consciousness of the past is not inaccessible. In a 
sense, we have had the experience of 80 years of mulch- 



ing it over and trying to work out what the hell hap- 
pened. Now we can come to a better understanding. It 
is very clear there are differences between what we call 
the social sciences and the natural sciences. You could 
almost call history the laboratory of a mad scientist who 
doesn't have a very coherent idea for organizing his or 
her experiments. We are just left with the results, which 
we have to mulch over. All that "science" amounts to, 
in this case, is the claim that we can have a cumulative 
project of understanding history. 

I don't think that it is true that emancipatory politics 
is a product of the bourgeois era. The pre-bourgeois era 
is littered with various strange, mostly religious, Utopian 
sects attempting, in the Christian sense, to go back to 
the early church. What has changed with bourgeois so- 
ciety—and I would rather call it capitalism— is that the 
social basis is laid such that these attempts to change 
the world can actually amount to more than ephemeral 
communes. 

Back in 1920, we had five thousand people commit- 
ted, in some sense, to running around urging everybody 
to be a Marxist. Now we have five thousand people com- 
mitted to running around and pretending that they are 
good, old-fashioned Labour social democrats. That is 
a serious change. Our project is a long-term one. We 
don't think we are going to turn this around in five years 
or ten years. Just as if we wanted to institute bourgeois 
state regimes, as in the 17 th century or the 18 th century, 
we would have needed to deal with the disaster of the 
Italian city states in the 1 5 th and 1 6 th century. As an 
aside: A large part of Shakespeare's work is propagan- 
dizing how terrible these societies were. That is what 
was going on in the Merchant of Venice, Two Gentlemen of 
Verona, and Romeo and Juliet. Look at the terrible bloody 
warfare! Wouldn't it be better if they had a proper king? 
And this is similar to 1 9 th century British propaganda 
about the French Revolution. 

As they say, if you kick a dog, it will probably bite you. 
The mistake is spontaneitist and anarchist trends, which 
expect that these reflexes will solve everything, which 
of course they don't. But there will always be opportuni- 
ties—little cracks that you can wedge politics into. This 
doesn't mean going back to rethinking the basic terms of 
what emancipation could mean in a particular historical 
circumstance, but attempting to produce a politics that 
makes a difference, thinking about it not in terms of the 
possibilities in the next five years, but the next fifty years. 

BS: I think there is an opportunity for a formation like the 
left party in Germany— which I am sure neither of you 
has much faith in— but which would present an opening 
for the radical left, which historically has been symbiotic 
or parasitic on broader, reformist workers' movements. I 
think these developments can open up new political pos- 
sibilities. In America, we've never developed to the point 
of having a Social-Democratic or workers' movement. 
In Britain, where they have a bourgeois workers' party, 
their best achievement is social liberalism. 

Even with American liberalism today, we can identify 
two different camps: We can see liberals committed to 
this New Deal coalition and we have liberals who are 
technocratic or deep into "third-way" politics. The tech- 




JACOBIN 




nocratic liberals are, in a sense, more sophisticated, in 
that they actually saw the crisis of the American welfare 
state in the 1970s and saw the crisis of the broader 
center-left. They actually adapted their program to this 
crisis. This gap between these main factions of what 
used to be the American center-left presents politi- 
cal opportunities that might not even come close to 
emancipatory politics in our generation, but could still 
provide the terrain in which the Left can regroup, build 
itself institutionally, and become a leading element in 
a broader, center-left anti-austerity movement, thus 
opening up possibilities for politics in the future. 

Q&A 

This is a Western-focused audience, so when I keep hear- 
ing about "failure, " "addressing our history, " and looking 
for chances or ruptures, I wonder, in what contexts is this 
more negative position warranted? What about actually 
existing revolutions like the Bolivarian revolution? 

BS: A Third World impulse has done the Left a great 
deal of harm. A lot of the problems of the New Left 
have to do with Third Worldism. As far as the Bolivar- 
ian revolution, I see positive aspects of it, but it is on 
the populist continuum. The best way forward for the 
American left is to help these other struggles by build- 
ing an opposition movement in the U.S. I am not saying 
that there has to be revolution in the United States first, 
but if there were some weak link in European capital- 
ism, it would greatly help the European struggle if there 
were a strong leftist party in the United States with 
20,000-30,000 active members, who could immediately 
launch a propaganda war. I think, to some extent, that 
it is an unhealthy impulse on the Left to immediately 
look to relevant struggles overseas— whether in Cuba or 
the Maoists in Nepal. We can be in solidarity with these 
struggles, although, more often than not, we should be 
critical of a lot of them. 

JT: The fundamental issue with Venezuela is that it is 
simply too historically specific. What lessons can we 
learn? That, in order to have a revolution, you need a 
charismatic leftist army officer in charge of a country 
with oil reserves? This is not a broad historical move- 
ment; it is a singularity. It would be false and patron- 
izing to say that it is not a good thing to lift an enormous 
amount of people out of illiteracy and poverty on the 
basis of mobilization, but this is as vulnerable as the 
welfare state of the 1960s and 1970s. 

"Conversations" continues on page 4